I saw your light, now it burns forever

Some thoughts on a year, some PDFs on a theme

I’ve been thinking about Rage Against the Machine all week. In high school, in Los Angeles, radicalized by poems and music and Zack de la Rocha himself, we would go to their concerts whenever they played live. One day we walked out of class to go to a protest downtown, against police brutality, though I’m sure there was an inciting incident where a civilian was brutalized, I cannot remember which this round. My friends and I ended up marching beside Zack and his bandmates while they screamed demands into a bullhorn they passed around like a flask. It felt like a rite of passage. It was the first time I felt beautiful in the way a woman does, sovereign, not just of body but of spirit, like I could trust myself to be in the right place at the right time. Beauty is a rhythm that builds exuberance.

Not long after the protest, I’d been editing my high school literary magazine and published a piece on censorship that took me to the principal’s office, he wanted it redacted. I can’t remember his name, but he was a black man, and I was more disappointed in him that he could ever have been in me. I tend to have op amnesia. Anyhow, we won, the magazine remained as intended, and off we went to Kinkos, to print in overflow because the issue gained more attention this way. You quickly learn that controversy is a currency in every area of the arts and should not be contrived or exploited. When it arrives unintended, it’s your duty to address it though, to override it.

I went off to Berkeley and became more and more disaffected in my pseudo-militancy. I focused on critical theory and writing poems and was told you can go to graduate school and write poems so I did that next, at Columbia in New York. Every night then and now, I’d be up till 4 AM reading, writing, hunting for snatches of language and meaning in books and Internet archives that might breed ideas. That was all I did besides rapaciously listening to music and, in summers, teaching a dance intensive for youth with Alvin Ailey. I’d stay up till 4 AM then too, then take a bus across town and dance all day, nap, repeat. My rage against the god in the machine had been tempered by duty; the next time I saw Zack de la Rocha it was at a spa on a visit home to LA during a winter break in grad school. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Souls unite blindly, in rhythm,

By then I’d met Amiri Baraka, fallen in love with a musician whose work I’d loved from afar for years, and the world was a black poem I promised myself to enact and uphold. The Rage song in my head that inspired this reminiscence is “War Within a Breath” which offers the hook everything can change, a new years day, as threat, and sites Gaza, intifada, in its first verse. The song was released November 2, 1999, on their Battle of Los Angeles LP. Twenty-five years have allegedly passed (maybe time is as false as a mystic calls it, maybe we need Rumi, Jesus), and the flame in the song still burns prayer circles around its moving target. Another catalyst for my nostalgia might be my interview with Saul Williams last week. Around the time I discovered Rage, I discovered his work too. We would go to venues in L.A. to watch him read poems and see him alone at hip hop shows. Years later I’d be a poet alone at shows and years after that Saul would be a new friend, reader of my work, collaborator in heart and will. In what feels like a flash but is actually a decades’-long commitment to staying true, seismic shifts in the spirit do occur and are sustained by continued commitment to the same level of creative freedom through discipline, the poetic spirit does not retreat but it needs food or it can become violent and too unruly to see its own beauty through.

I sat down to write a couple of sentences, to be terse, about how music felt to me this year. I wanted to address the fact that all of my semi linear writing or storytelling is my means of paving paths back to poems and songs, building a fortress around the sacred and more vulnerable forms I cherish beyond measure, using the bright shadows of these more formally complete sentences, stalking them for shrouded light. I was on the phone with Fred Moten earlier, he’d sent a text that led to a call, and he reminded me to be proud of my variegated output, to raise a glass, and I him. His son is an incredible writer on his way to college who reminds me, for the lucky third time, how my heart sings from 1999. Fred and I made a short film this year, I’d almost forgotten. My mind is trained on a moving target, a feeling that I can only reach when improvising in large and small ways, between projects, sentences, words, etcetera. We need poet friends willing to stride alongside us, and the poems and songs themselves. And so I have no resounding statement on the year in music other than to say to access something fittingly “political” in music (a pitiful, oversimplified descriptor), I had to go back all those years. My other sentiments are in this archive and pending and spilling into poems and prose and sounds to come in hopes of inventing better incidents of resistance.

My resolution, one of many, to memorize a poem a month, ensuring that a year from now I’ll have another twenty-five year old song on my mind and be forced to recite it awkwardly at a party or in a cypher, (maybe we bring those back), maybe the war will be over, the genocidal banished into anti love-songs.

Below, I’m attaching a PDF of my first book of poems to thank everyone for your support in this labor of love and discovery of what we might say uncensored by different market forces, along with a PDF of a book I love about exile and return. I’d needed a copy of my own book recently and realized I’d given them all away, which made me happy, and also keen to create an archive just in case I do it again. Poems make thinking all of this through worth it, they are the what dismantles the machine simply by making it hate itself.